Considerable progress has been made to employ standardized containers for shipping goods by air, truck and/or ships. These containers have been internationally standardized to be about forty feet in length, eight feet in width and about eight feet in height. There are other standardizations, such as the weight of cargo that they must be able to adequately handle. An important standard resides in the fact that the containers are to be stackable in the hold or on a deck of a ship. To accomplish this satisfactorily it has been decided to distribute the load of a container above a first container by distributing the weight to only the end walls of the lower container. This was accomplished by supplying corner feet to all of the corners of a container and to supply weight distribution fitments to the top corners of the containers at their respective end walls.
In each instance the feet and the upper corner are the protrusions that are most extending so that they not only receive the weight from the container thereabove but also distribute the weight directly therebelow.
The upper corners are also adapted and constructed whereby the container may be picked up by their upper corner fitments and transported by a crane or gantry to be re-positioned in the ship or onto another vessel or onto shore as desired.
These containers are also adapted to be handled and loaded onto specialized trucks and to be carried to destinations thereon as desired. U.S. Pat. No. 4,132,325 discloses such a truck for loading and unloading and carrying a container of the type contemplated although the container of the present invention is an ingenious improvement over such such container.
As such, it should be noted that the container has an elongated tunnel below the cargo carrying bottom whereby part of the mechanism of the container handling equipment may fit into the tunnel and under the container at the conclusion of loading the specialized truck.
Frequently, such containers with which the present invention pertains is of a type which does not require side walls nor does it need a roof. In such instances, it would be wise to provide for fold down end walls to thereby compact the cargo holder. In such a compacted position a plurality of cargo holders may be stacked one on top of the other to thereby conserve space.
To make a cargo holder with foldable end walls would ordinarily put unacceptable strains on any hinge employed especially when undue weight from stacked containers is put on the end walls of containers in lower positions.
It is therefore an object of the invention to disclose and claim a cargo container having foldable side walls wherein the burden of the weight imposed on the respective end walls is not placed directly on a hinge but is transferred to a stoop means positioned on the portion of a separate wall directly below.
It is also an object to rigidly control the degree of rotatability of the said upper portion of the end wall to avoid over rotation even when cargo may be thrust against the inside portion of the end wall.
It is also an object to lock the upper end wall portion into position until it is desired to release it to assume a folded down position.